Cycling secrets stirred rather than shaken

Cycling NZ high performance director Mark Elliott. Photo / Greg Bowker

On the face of it, international track cycling is a straight-out duel between riders on bikes along boards.

Dig deeper and the sporting equivalent of a John Le Carre novel potentially emerges, where espionage to glean innovation and technology advantages can determine medals and livelihoods.

That's not to say an army of James Bonds lurk in each velodrome's shadows but Cycling New Zealand took no risks protecting their intellectual property last weekend during the World Cup event.

The difference with most international meets was that the Cambridge venue doubles as New Zealand's training base.

"We kept some doors shut," Cycling NZ high performance director Mark Elliott dead-panned about their precautions. "We made sure our service quarters were out of bounds and changed our security processes, but it's generally not a public area anyway. However, we had 300 competitors walking past our team zone, so we blocked off the ability for them to see inside.

"Most countries run their own data collection systems but it is not so much what you have. What you do with it is the important part."

Elliott said little can be gained at short notice from others' innovations, and that's a poor mindset to get into because, as soon as teams follow, they lose the initiative.

"We have roles in our team to look at what oppositions are doing, but the more important ones are those you don't see, working behind the scenes creating future innovations.

"That's probably one of the great things about New Zealand sport, we're prepared to take a risk. The outcome can be positive, like with Linda Villumsen and her [time trial] bike at the world champs. We worked out how fast that bike was behind the scenes and it delivered us a world title."

With such events decided by split-seconds, such knowledge and technology become a critical component to teams' success. New Zealand riders earned three medals in Cambridge and other countries have watched with interest New Zealand's development as a force in world track cycling in recent years.

Elliott was keen not to overplay the clandestinity of the process.

"Most of it is fairly open. You have a set of rules to work with regarding the weight and measurements of equipment on the world stage. Every so often, you will see a different disc wheel or frame, but for us, the World Cup was more a learning opportunity because within the velodrome, we have a whole lot of ways to understand what happens with performance. It was more a data capturing than data protection exercise.

"We had a couple of closed sessions leading in to the World Cup where a lot of countries were floating around, so we shut the velodrome down. We blocked off the bottom stairs and ensured the only people in the building were from our programme."

Elliott said another step in preparing intelligence for their Rio campaign is familiarising them-selves with the Olympic velodrome dimensions which, while each track remains 250m and is ridden anti-clockwise, can vary in steepness and straight lengths between venues.

"The wooden boards [generally Siberian spruce timber in which the close grain rarely splinters] always have subtleties, but the biggest difference is the environment. The summer Olympics are in Brazil's winter so we have to work out what the temperature system's like in the building, along with taking the humidity and barometric pressure into account. But our riders are used to adapting."

New Zealand are expected to send coaching personnel to the March test event in Rio and Elliott said they have faith in an Olympic track designed by German Ralph Schuermann, the architect of the Cambridge boards.